Not Prepared for This AT ALL

This week my kids start fifth grade. Last week, we got a letter from our synagogue welcoming us to the Bnei Mitzvah program - meaning my kids are now 2 years away from standing in front of a jillion people and entering into their religious adulthood.

Those two things combined meant I almost had a nervous breakdown.

Sure, I'd love to write this blog post all about how I didn't think time would go by this quickly, how I can hardly remember them being toddlers, how all those parents were right about cherishing the moments of their childhood, how next thing you know I will blink and they will be graduating college, and blah blah blah blah.

Instead I'm going to talk about how I am really not prepared for this stage of their lives. I can remember - with vivid clarity - when it was ME starting 5th grade. I actually have very few memories of my childhood at all. I can remember a few moments from 4th grade, but it's only back to 5th grade that I can remember much at all.  From others I've spoken to, apparently this is sorta strange - you're meant to remember the time before then. I don't - and so maybe this is why I feel so ill-prepared to be mothering these pre-teens.  By the end of this year, I'm surely going to find myself buying a bra for at least one of my girls. How very...odd. I can remember buying MY first bra (probably the only one I've owned which did not require extreme feats of engineering.)  I just find it quite remarkable that I'm experiencing my kids going through stages of life which I'm sure were only yesterday for me. Every time we pass another milestone from here on in, it won't take much effort for me to cast my mind backwards to a time when I too was dealing with the same thing.

Considering I often look at my life and think, "How on earth did I get to be this age?!" ... I don't think I'm going to cope all that well. I fully expect to have far more emotional reactions to things than my kids will. It will be ME crying about their first periods, ME carrying on like a idiot when they start to like people of the opposite or same sex, ME who loses it entirely when they come home drunk from a party. Not because I can't imagine them growing up, not because I will mourn the end of their childhood (although there is that, too) but because I'll finally have to face the fact that I, too, have grown up.

Damn. I knew it had to happen, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.